That is with out question, but "compelling state interest" is infinitely worse and more destructive to liberty as a legal concept than "diversity."
Close behind as a liberty denying and disparaging legal concept is the phrase "public safety" when used by your governments as justification for denying and disparaging your rights.
Both suffer from the same problem of being amorphous. "Diversity" is definitely in the eye of the beholder and can be interpreted in just about any way the colleges need to in order to advance their agenda.
I am so glad that Steyn decided to focus on the "diversity" ruling (let's stop saying this is an "affirmative action" ruling -- the rules of the game have changed and it is now "diversity") vs. a column on the sodomy ruling. Both are outrages, really; but, with the "diversity" ruling, my "equal protection under the law" constitutional right has been taken away from me for the purposes of college admission (and employment I imagine). The same with my children, and (because Sandra decided to arbitrarilly pull a number 25 out of the air) perhaps my grandchildren.
Okay, so I don't have a college education, so perhaps I'm reading this wrong, but isn't that the practical effect of this ruling --- to remove the "equal protection" clause in the Constitution from certain ethnic groups?
The only explanation is to start with the following examples of quota and stealth appointments to the court itself---most markedly the female ACLU lawyer quota [Ginsburg] and the republican fluff head woman from a western state quota-first female on the court--does it make you proud, girls [O'Connor]; and then the quota for how can a republican appointment to the court be made when the president appointing him will not have a clue as to how leftist his positions will actually be--yeah that quota--thank you, Warren Rudman, you sanctimonious snaky blowhard[Souter].
We really should save a fair share of the blame for Orrin Hatch-who has been chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee for far too long and had a hand in Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer. I guess the Mormon numbskull quota had to be served --but, at least, here it is voters not the intelligentisia giving us the mediocrities [though it is the elite judiciary committee that elects him its feckless chairman, on quota principles of some kind, no doubt] Talk about simpering airheads!
It all started with the Nixon administration trying to appear "mainstream" with quotas for blacks and women. This has destroyed intellectual life in the universities and the resulting generation has now had its effect. One by product has been that young men are no longer going to college because the whole education game has been rigged against them into a feminist fantasy playland from pre-K through graduate school. Wouldn't you really like to be a young boy starting your educational career in these times when fanatical feminst haters of males have been in positions of influence for a generation and have adopted educational principles that "celebrate girls" in order to let "girls rule". That is the situation now, folks, like it or not. A well-meaning teacher cannot even turn the tide. That is why the rules curriculum has to be enforced with such a heavy hand. This is our current diversity delivered to you from a hand behind closed doors. This is the mechanism that has just been enshrined as constitutionally permissible as a compelling state interst to merit the use of suspect race classifications in educational admission decisions! All because swign vote Sandra Day O'Connor felt this is the murky way to go.
Well, when you have quotas and loss of principle up and down the line, you end up with this kind of s_ _ t.